Eleven O'Clock ▹Muggle

Chapter 8

'They're cold as hell'

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If someone was to ask a child - maybe seven or eight - where they envisioned their fifteen-year-old self, their dreams would be big; ambitious. Cassandra had dreams as well - she still does - but when she envisioned her fifteen-year-old self she never imagined the situation she now found herself in.

Her head was pounding tremendously, and she gripped it with a whimper, her body involuntarily curling up into a fetus position. Her blood was on fire, scalding her veins as it passed through her, with several shrieks of pain her body had grown numb; numb to the concrete floor, which iciness should've sent chills up her spine; numb to the taunts and jeers of men and women as they slid the occasional bowl of some kind of grey substance under the grate.

She had woken up weeks ago - or possibly days (each hour moulded into one in this gloomy cell) - at first she panicked, she wondered where she was, where her sisters were. After hours of screaming through the walls of this prison, she had become a lifeless shadow curled up in a dark corner of the cell, her thought - her demons - the only friend she had.

Her only form of time was the whipping wind that battered against her cells concrete wall, howling down the narrow hallway and up into what she could only assume was her captures lair. She would hear shouts, screams, that came from above, they paralysed her from clawing at the steel door like some kind of untamed caged animal.

With no recollection of what she was captured for, her mind was left to ponder; wonder who these people were, question why they wanted her - worry about what had happened to her sisters. Her mind had always been a dark place, but when she was left in a cold cell, with unanswered questions battering her mind, it only made it all the darker; were they dead, or in a cage similar to the one she was held in - what about the excruciating screams she heard, were they her sisters? Was the fate she held better than the ones they had?

She had no answer to her questions, and they were a chance that she never would. They were a chance she would never see daylight again, apart from the flickering rays that fought their way through the small, high up window; a window that was too high up for her to even see out of.

The metal of the grate cried against the stone as the cell door was shoved open, Cassandra kept her heavy eyes downcast on the dirty floor, "Get up." She felt a cold hand grasp around the ends of her dull, limp hair, he dragged her upwards, Cassandra stumbled on her feet; her legs weak from being huddled on the floor for at leanest a weeks worth of moons.

She kept her lips plastered firmly together, swallowing the lingering taste of metallic residing in the back of her parched throat, "Where are we going?" She finally gasped, as they reached the floor above her prison.

The man - whose face she had yet to see - silenced her with a shove, "Be quiet!" Cassandra stumbled on her feet, her hearing ringing incessantly from the sudden movement. She stayed silent as the man dragged her through the mansion's parlour, and choose to keep her eyes wide and eager; looking for an exit into her freedom. The parlour was wildly decorated, with what Cassandra could only assume was the finest and most expensive decorations.

The next room was bigger than the first; the ceiling was higher, and the floor and walls were not decorated with such a delicate hand as the last. This room had no expensive-looking furnishings, instead, it was cold and dark; save for a gloomy light that cast across the long, old table that resided in the middle of the room. Cassandra swallowed nervously, the air leaving an unsettling feeling to lay in the pit of her stomach, it ached as a meal would if devoured too quickly, and a nagging through in the back of her mind told her this was the room the screams that kept her awake in her restless slumbers were coming from.